A Miniaturized Interferometric Receiver for Densely Integrated Large Arrays

This letter proposes and demonstrates a small-footprint interferometric six-port receiver (RX) unit developed for large-scale active RX arrays. The proposed architecture integrates three Lange couplers with a miniaturized Wilkinson power divider (WPD) and power detectors’ matching networks, achieving an exceptionally compact footprint of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.22\times 0.45~\lambda $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The proof-of-concept prototype operating at 5.6 GHz demonstrates a 3 GHz six-port junction bandwidth and supports a data rate of 200 Mbps, validating the anticipated performance. The introduced compactness, along with the inherent low local oscillator (LO) power requirement and integrated circuit (IC) compatibility, makes the proposed RX an excellent candidate for high-frequency and power-efficient large-scale RX arrays.